Medusa, sister gorgon with snake-hair, had such a terrifying face that she turned anyone who looked at her into stone. To kill her, Perseus had to look at her in the reflection of his shield, outwitting her stupefying power.

Medusa is a documentary project that questions the link between face and identity, in the particular fringe embodied by disfigured people.

If the other is face, is there otherness when there is no face? When we exchange looks with a disfigured person, can we still interact with her/him? How can one exist without what nowadays seems to be a condition to socialization, to humanity? How can one fit in when being stared at, when identity and looks are more and more intertwined? How can one rebuild their identity after such a loss, what strategies can be used to go back to a decent self?

The Medusa project, like Perseus, tries to use reflections as it navigates between different means of expression, summoning real life or fictional elements, staging, unexpectedness and allegories. These “sidesteps” are a way to shed different lights on the questions raised, by shifting from frontal violence which, according to me, stupefies the mind.

This project’s main approach is to try and work hand-in-hand with disfigured people so as to create a space in which they can express their feelings.

The daily perceptions of the participants, their history, their limits, their strategies, their humour, their relationship with others, to the outside, to beauty and its standards will be our Ariadne’s thread. This work will be the result of our time together and will draw on the pictures created in the gaps caused by disfigurement in everyday life.